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Murdock: Gay by chromosomes or by choice? Who cares?

That first question agitates some people — as liberal commenter Ezra Klein now knows. He recently hired Brandon Ambrosino for his new website, vox.com. Ambrosino is a 23-year-old gay man. But that does not satisfy the gay Left. Ambrosino, who attended the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, believes that choice may influence sexuality.

“Many people do feel as if their sexuality is something they were born with,” Ambrosino wrote in The New Republic. “But as I and other queer persons will re3adily confirm, there are other factors informing our sexualities than simply our genetic codes.”

Ambrosino is in trouble for not parroting the gay rights movement’s “born gay” hypothesis. If gays pop out of wombs that way, the argument goes, equality will cascade forth like Iguazú. If being gay is a choice, however, the public and politicians will respond: “Eeeeeeeeew, gross! Shut up and get back in the closet!” Bye bye, gay marriage. Hello, again, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

It should have ZERO bearing on public policy whether people are gay by nature or because some conclude — as a man might — “You know, on a 60-40 basis, I really prefer to love and sleep with men more than women. So, I hereby choose to be gay.” So long as this involves consenting adults, it is nobody’s bloody business if people are born gay or eventually calculate to be so.

In this and so many other spheres, government’s role should be what our Founding Fathers declared on July 4, 1776: to leave consenting adults free to pursue happiness. If same-sex relationships please certain grown-ups, it should make no difference whether they are propelled by chromosomes, choices, or both.

It is truly stunning that the same gay liberals who promote the highly fluid, all-inclusive, and jaw-breaking LGBTQQI label (that is — inhale! — “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, and intersex”) also claim that being any of the above is baked in the genetic cake. Period.

But if some people are “questioning,” presumably their answers entail at least a little volition. And if transgenders can choose to change sexes surgically, is it really beyond polite inquiry to posit that some people might sit down, run the numbers, and then decide, “Hey, I want to be gay!” Indeed, if people so choose, isn’t that something that gay rights advocates should celebrate?

Furthermore, the idea that gay people must be “born that way” in order to assert equal rights is rubbish.

No known gene leads some black and white people to be romantically and sexually attracted to each other. Americans in interracial relationships enjoy every right available to every other citizen, not because they either were “born to” date or marry interracially, or chose to do so. They enjoy them because they are adult Americans, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

At its core, the gay Left’s “born that way” mantra springs from the notion that “No one would choose to be gay. We were born like this. So, please be nice to us.”

Imagine if the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had pleaded, “We’re Negroes by birth, not choice. So, please be nice to us.”

Rather than moan that, “We didn’t ask to be like this,” gays should insist on equal rights from a position of strength. To wit: “Maybe I was born this way. Maybe I made up my mind today. Maybe summa both. You gotta problem wit dat?”

Picture a young Robert De Niro saying those words, and you will visualize the posture from which gay rights should advance in America.

Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.